It is becoming more and more apparent that being bullied in childhood can have profound and long-lasting negative effects. A number of studies have now shown the impact of bullying on adult behavior and a few have demonstrated that physical health can be affected as well. Dr. Michael Friedman recently offered an excellent post about why bullies bully and how that behavior can be reinforced. In the post, he refers briefly to a recent study by Bill Copeland and others from Duke that looks at a potential pathway, chronic inflammation, that may connect the dots between being a bully victim to having poorer health outcomes. This important research deserves a little extra attention.

The study uses data from the Great Smoky Mountain Study (GSMS). While many people not familiar with child mental research may have never heard of this, the GSMS has tracked the lives of a group of children living in rural North Carolina for many years, and has been a very important source of data regarding the prevalence of emotional-behavioral problems and their development over time.

Like any large group of kids, most of them were not involved in bullying, some were chronic bully victims, some were primarily bullies themselves, and another group could be both bullies and bully victims (bully-victims). These subjects are now young adults and their blood was drawn to measure levels of something called C-reactive protein (CRP), which is known to be a marker for how much chronic low grade inflammation a body experiences.

Across childhood and adolescence, CRP levels tend to rise for everyone, However, those who were bullied more often were found to have higher than expected CRP levels compared to those uninvolved in bullying. Perhaps even more unexpected, however, was that those who tended to bully others had lower CRP levels. Finally, individuals who went back and forth between being a bully and being a victim had CRP levels that were no different than those not involved with bullying.

Copeland and his coauthors concluded that chronic inflammation may be a key factor involved in the poor mental and physical health that has been documented among victims of bullying. They hypothesized that the increased inflammation might be due to bully victims experiencing less of the anti-inflammatory effects of cortisol which can become less responsive under conditions of chronic stress.

One thing that did not fit so well in this study was that their group of bully-victims had the same CRP levels of those uninvolved in bullying. This group, according to other published studies, often has been shown to have the worst mental and physical health of all, so one might expect that they would have had high inflammation as well.

Could being a bully be good for your health? That is one provocative finding from the study. Certainly, a strategy of bullying others may not work so well as an adult (subjects were only 21 years old when this study was published). Also, there may be many other ways for a child to be successfully social that don’t involve hurting others.

On a side note, the study also beautifully illustrates how the worlds of physical and mental health are so interconnected.

It's far too common to underestimate the seriousness and long-term health complications brought on by childhood bullying. Many serious health problems persist years after adolescence has ended.

Our studies have shown that 20% of colon cancer cases in middle aged men can be traced to wedgies given between the ages of 10 and 14. And serious sinal damage, even emphysema, can often be traced to "swirlies" caused by submersion in urinals and junior high school toilets during recess. We have even disovered that 2.5 million cases of skin cancer each year were caused by "Indian burns."

I've suffered from bullying. It seemed that my parents were never around to help me. There was one who ambushed me when I was walking home from school. I tried to tell my parents, but they were in another world. Likewise when I was older, I was chased and beaten by bullies. The father of one of them was some kind of council member. This particular bully had a slingshot--he like to propel rocks and projectiles past the faces of his victims.

What I would like to do, as this was decades ago and as I still suffer from nightmares, is to find these bullies today. This has involved the construction of a time machine. My plan is to locate these bullies, and send them even further back in time to the Hadean era, before the Earth was bombarded with the comets that provided the water for the oceans, and from which life eventually emerged. This would give me a sense of closure about the matter.